


heavens full of branching ways

by dirtybinary



Series: The Second Interstellar Punic War [2]
Category: Ancient History RPF, Punic Wars RPF
Genre: Alternate History - Hannibal Wins, Alternate Universe - Space Opera, Eye Trauma, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-26
Updated: 2018-02-26
Packaged: 2019-03-24 07:22:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,517
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13806291
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dirtybinary/pseuds/dirtybinary
Summary: This is how a war starts.





	heavens full of branching ways

**Author's Note:**

> A character study of the Barcids, in preparation for a bigger project. This is a companion piece to [the ceiling of our day](http://archiveofourown.org/works/13031442), and will make much more sense if you read that first.

Hannibal is almost used to this now: the flickering lights, the old sound file echoing in the stillness of the cabin, remote and cavernous and huge and faint all at once. “Do you want to come with me, child? You don’t have to.”

Surus’ ventilator hiccups, and the screens on the ceiling above Hannibal’s sickbed freeze. System diagnostics in one, casualty reports in another, the shaky footage from the Ticinus looping in a third. Sosylus forbade him from doing any work (“not an unreasonable request, I think, till we know if you’re about to _die_ ”), but Hannibal is sure of his own longevity, and Flaminius’ fleet is still days from landing on Trasimene. He has to pass the time somehow. “Do you want to come along? It’s dangerous in Spain.”

It’s dangerous everywhere. Hannibal’s fever has subsided, but half the world has gone dark, and under the antiseptic swathings his eye socket feels like a nest of fire ants. “You made it sound like an adventure,” he says. “Of course I wanted to go.”

The hologram blinks into view at his bedside. “Promise me, then. Say this oath.”

Its indifferent face glows green at the edges. This is not Hamilcar as Hannibal remembers him best from his boyhood, tousled, windswept, frowning with impatience or with concentration; this is the avatar his father used for answering bothersome calls from Carthage, perfectly coiffed and utterly senatorial, a string of emeralds glinting like a diadem in the hem of his headcloth. Hannibal says, “I already did.”

“Put your hands on the sacrifice,” Hamilcar insists. Through his translucent form the _Neptune_ appears suspended in the middle of the ceiling, its young pilot a pixelated speck above. “Repeat after me.”

Hannibal wonders, not for the first time, what would have happened if he’d refused—if he’d said goodbye to his father at the age of nine and gone to Alexandria to study astrophysics, like he’d rather fancied doing at the time. He wouldn’t be here on Trasimene now, lying in wait for thirty thousand Romans while Surus’ hull nurses barnacles in the blanketing fog. He’d still have both his eyes, too.

“Yes,” he says, “all right.”

From duty or from guilt, or just because the ghost won’t leave him alone till he does, Hannibal repeats the old promise for his father, the one he first made with his hands in a bowl of cow’s blood and has guarded like an heirloom ever since. _By Baal and Melqart, Tanit and Astarte, the gods who rule Carthage and are witnesses to this oath: I swear that for as long as I live, I shall never be a friend to Rome._

The hologram begins to fade. The screens unglitch, and the video resumes. The _Neptune_ ’s pilot leaps through the crossfire to land on the crumpled hull of the Capuan flagship, no weapon, no tether, just the strength of his body and a hand outstretched to pull his wounded father from the cockpit. He must be seventeen or eighteen at most—the same age Hannibal was at Helike, at the ambush, when Hamilcar’s hovercraft plunged burning into the river.

The footage loops again. He watches Publius Scipio hurl himself between the arcing lasers, graceful and deadly as the slash of a meteor, and the familiar noose of restless nerves tightens at the base of his stomach.

 

 

“Our father was a brilliant man,” says Arishat, “but trying to upload his own brain was not one of his better ideas.”

Their father is a dead man, is what he is. Three weeks dead, and Hannibal is watching him pace up and down Surus’ bridge, crackling inaudible commands from the hidden speakers in the walls—something something Aegates defeat, something something evacuate Eryx, something something fuck the Senate. “Can we,” Hannibal says, and stops, scrounges for words. “Delete the file? Lay him to rest?”

“Not without damaging the mainframe,” says Handsome. Arishat’s husband, and now the most powerful man this side of the Ebro. He gives Hannibal a sharp look. “It’s just a loop of code. Like an echo. Harmless.”

Surus’ engine snickers. Hamilcar was not, in life, the sort of person anyone would call harmless. “I’ll get used to it,” says Hannibal.

Arishat exchanges a look with Handsome. “You sure? We just got eighty new ships from Carthage. You could take your pick.”

Surus churrs again. Their father’s flagship, loyal to the end, even if the experiment with telepathic piloting hadn’t quite worked out. Or maybe it had. There’s a reason Hannibal survived the ambush, after all. He pets the dashboard absently, and the elephantine blows a stream of warm air at him from a nearby vent. “I’m sure.”

 

 

This is how a war starts:

A city falls, a city called Saguntum on a Spanish planet of the same name, and an angry Roman appears in Carthage demanding restitution. _Hand over the faithless children of Hamilcar Barca, and we may pardon this outrage against our friends._ The Senate tells him no, and so the envoy shakes war from the folds of his toga, and the legions begin to arm.

Or perhaps the event horizon lies farther back. Perhaps it starts when Handsome—ever the skillful diplomat—signs a treaty with the Romans not to cross in arms beyond the Ebro asteroids, which ring the Spanish sun far out in the icy reaches of the system. Unfortunately, both parties overlook the existence of Saguntum, the Roman ally with the bizarre elliptical orbit that slings it onto Carthage’s side of the Ebro for approximately eight months of every eight hundred years: a window fast approaching, and which the Saguntines spend causing trouble for Hannibal. Who has, by then, succeeded his brother-in-law, and is not interested in being either handsome or diplomatic.

Perhaps if he had slightly better ships, or slightly more loyal subjects, or were slightly less opposed to dropping an asteroid on the planet and having done with it, he might have concluded the siege before Saguntum slipped back onto the wrong side of the Ebro. Or perhaps it was too late even then. Perhaps it was not so much the case of a new war breaking out as of the last one failing to end, and Hamilcar’s faithless children did not ignite the fighting; they were merely born into it.

Hannibal does not profess to understand how wars start. He is far more interested in ending them, eye or no eye, ghost or no ghost.

 

 

The _Clytemnestra_ descends on the camp at Geronium with a virulent screech of engines, and Arishat billows onto Surus’ bridge like something spat out of the Styx. “Good to see,” she says, “that the flagship of the Shining City looks like a heap of garbage from the air.”

Surus burps rudely. With one tusk missing and rust gathering on all the ferrous surfaces of his hull, he does look rather shabby next to Arishat’s sleek Spanish gladiola. Arishat looks Hannibal up and down, and pokes at the strip of cloth covering his right eye. “What did you do with your prosthetic?”

“He threw it out the airlock,” says Mago from the floor under the fold-out desk. They have just spent an hour going through the fleet inventories, a task that tends to put people on the floor these days. “Sosylus nearly had apoplexy.”

“It gave me migraines,” says Hannibal. “Do you have news for me or are you just here to mock?”

Arishat grabs the bottle of Falernian red—about the only provision they are not short on—out of Mago’s hand and sets about melding herself into the nearest chair. She has been far afield most of the past two years, launching spy satellites, making contacts in Campania, bullying food and fuel out of the Gauls. “The _Neptune_ ’s with Fabius Maximus. Your pilot was the one who bombed that grain silo last week. If you’re starving, you have him to blame.”

“And yourself,” adds Mago with a sharp-edged grin.

He steals back the Falernian. Hannibal, who has learnt that the only thing to do when his siblings join forces is to stage a tactical retreat, gets up and goes over to the sector maps on the wall. The allied Gallic moons are picked out in Tyrian purple, isolated specks in a wash of Roman red. “What,” says Arishat behind him. “It’s true then? He let the boy live?”

“Our noble brother,” says Mago, “had little Publius in his crosshairs for eight solid seconds and didn’t fire. We watched that video so many times, I could draw you a chart from memory.”

Hannibal ignores them. Mago’s elephantine is a new model fresh from the great production plants back at home, and Arishat inherited her fancy racing ship from Handsome. Neither of them have to live with a ghost. “You said last year the Capuans were coming over to us,” he says.

“I’m still working on them,” says Arishat. “Popular opinion is that you’ll either be wiped out by Varro’s eight legions or starve by year’s end. I don’t blame them for being cautious.”

The flight path of the massive Roman fleet crosses the maps in a bright zigzag of crimson, circling one planet after another to pick up the acceleration it needs to intercept Hannibal’s ships. Soon their paths will converge at a tiny moonlet called Cannae, a place that has figured large in his plans for a while now. “We’ll see about that.”

“If you’re having second thoughts,” says Arishat, “I could always garrote this Scipio boy in his sleep.”

“Please don’t,” says Mago. “I’m the one who’ll have to hear about it for weeks.”

The wine bottle clinks. Hannibal does not have to turn around to feel the weight of Arishat’s gaze on him. “You have some premonition about him?”

She was the one who took Hannibal on his first spacewalk at the Eryx station, when he was six and she was nine and their parents were too busy gunning down Romans to mind what their two eldest charges got up to. They crashlanded jetpacks on the Byrsa, made up filthy parodies of Homer, served as junior officers on board Surus together. If he lies, Hannibal thinks, she will know.

“No,” he says. “I just recognise talent when I see it.”

Her smile is ominous. She does know.

 

 

This is how a war does not end:

Hannibal wins a battle, a battle greater than any ever fought, which will paint the sky over Cannae red with dust and debris for decades after he’s gone. He sends Arishat to Rome to negotiate peace, and he has a mind to be generous, he truly does, but they don’t even let her land. The Romans, she is informed in no uncertain terms, do not make peace except as victors.

He’s not surprised, not really. By now he understands a few things about this warlike people his family has fought for so long. He merely sits in his cabin with his hair dripping from the shower, listening to Mago swear and imprecate up and down the hangar, all the while his father’s ghostly voice rumbles muffled warnings through the walls. “It must’ve been your stupid racing engine,” he tells Arishat through the comms screen. “They couldn’t hear you over all that screeching.”

Arishat makes a rude gesture. “Do you want the good news or not?”

“I can’t imagine any.”

“And you used to be so clever,” she says. “I’m in Campania. My spies tell me there’s a nice Capuan boy headed your way.”

 

 

It rains, the night of his failed assassination.

November is storm season here. The rain in Capua glimmers as it comes down—just the faintest seafoam green, drumming against rooftiles and windowpanes like a wild spirit demanding to be let in. It’s beautiful, like everything else Hannibal has seen since landing on the planet, and perhaps that is the trouble with Capua: it is too full of beautiful things. Perhaps that is why Hannibal is standing on the sheltered balcony on the upper floor of the Scipiones’ house in the third watch of the night, looking at the luminous rain, unable to relax. Beautiful things are most often also dangerous.

The man who joins him is older and taller than he was in the Ticinus video, but still eminently the same person, with the same tilt of the chin, the piercing Pallas-grey eyes. “It’s a phosphoric compound,” says Scipio. He’s polite enough to stand out of Hannibal’s blind spot without being asked. “Happens every few weeks. The haruspices can predict it.”

He’s still in his flight suit. Maybe—like Hannibal—he sleeps in it, or maybe—like Hannibal—he hasn’t tried sleeping yet. His perfume is sweet, on the floral side; a meaner person might call it effeminate. He wears it like a challenge, like the hiss of an antique sword in a conspirator’s study, and it suits him perfectly. “Does it poison the rain?” asks Hannibal.

Scipio laughs. He’s been more sure of himself since the night in Sthenius’ garden, easier in his manner around Hannibal. “My littlest sister washes her mouth with it to make her teeth glow in the dark.”

No use hurling it at the Romans, then. The eerie rainlight picks out the gold seams in Scipio’s tawny hair the same way it limns the boughs of the willows in the garden, embalming them in a sort of amniotic scintillance. _As for Hannibal, if you want to stab him, you’ll have to do it right through me._ Many beautiful things are dangerous. Not all. 

“It’s seventeen seconds by hovercraft,” says Scipio, “from here to the hangar.”

“What?”

“You were looking out the window all through dinner. Like you were calculating how long it would take to get to your ship if something happened.” A careful pause, while the patter of the rain marks time. “You don’t like being on land.”

It’s unnerving to be seen through like this, to have his vulnerabilities mapped and measured so precisely. He has sent away those who know him best: Mago is braving the journey to Carthage to scare up reinforcements; Arishat is off garroting people in Sicily; and Hasdrubal, who is arguably the most like him even if they would rather die than admit it, is the farthest away of all. But now—now here is the boy from the video, this grey-eyed daemon who watches Hannibal with such hungry intent, as if to press his every mood like a cut flower between the pages of a book. It is frightening, it is electrifying.

“I don’t sleep much on land,” says Hannibal at last. “I’m used to the engine noise.”

“Me too,” says Scipio. “Houses are too quiet.”

Neither of them volunteers the other reasons. Any spacefighter knows the terror of being ambushed on land away from their ship, gravity-trapped, unable to take off. At quiet moments like these Hannibal still hears the guns of Helike rattling at the back of his head. Seventeen seconds to the hangar, visible as a sloping roof on the light-dappled skyline; seventeen seconds to where Surus lies drowsing under Corinthian columns, with a restless ghost pacing his decks.

Scipio’s voice breaks into his reverie. “Can I ask you something? Why didn’t you fire on me at the Ticinus?”

This question again, no easier to answer than before, but of course Hannibal has a strategic diversion prepared. “You mean, apart from your aesthetic properties?”

Scipio grins. “I’m prepared to accept that as your sole reason.”

He is not the sort of person one can be facetious with. For a split second Hannibal wonders if Scipio has watched battle footage of him on loop, too; trawled old news feeds and radar logs for a glancing mention of his name. “You were brave,” he says. “And whatever you may have heard about me, I don’t like killing for its own sake.”

“Hm,” says Scipio. He looks unconvinced. “I’ll find out the rest of it someday.”

“I told you, it’s just your pretty face.”

There are very few occasions in Hannibal’s life where he does not know what he is doing. Now is not one of them. Scipio’s smile makes a reappearance, slow and spreading, fox-sly, fox-shy. “That must be it,” he says. “You know what? If you drive down to the hangar now, you could catch a few hours’ sleep on shipboard and get back by dawn. No one will notice.”

Hannibal considers this. He does miss the comforting drone of Surus’ engine, but it’s nice being free of the ghost for once, and the view of the rain is so very splendid from here. This is not Helike; there is no danger.

“I’ll stay,” he says. “I don’t mind.”

 

 

This is not Helike. Helike is the town with the palm grove, green and fragrant even at the first plunge of winter; the narrow path between the trees, the hovercraft jolting up and down, struggling to stay airborne with two of its propellers shot out. It’s the jolting Hannibal remembers best—almost like riding in a ground-bound vehicle, but of course he is the son of nobility and he has never had to do that. Gunshots whistle past the shattered windows. Hannibal cranes round the back seat and returns fire; Hasdrubal imitates him, fifteen and already a crackshot, and three, four, five of the pursuing rebel crafts go crashing to the road. Even so they won’t make it out alive. All their ships are in orbit, the closest launchpad a hundred miles away. “Go,” their father urges. “Jump out at the next bend, I’ll draw them off.”

 _No_ , Hannibal says. Or at least he hopes he said it, he must have protested, but Hamilcar is not a commander one can disobey. “Go! Take your brother and run!”

So he does, he takes his brother and runs, and the bend in the road screens their escape. They do hear the explosion, though, and glimpse the spire of smoke rising from the broad river where the hovercraft went down. That narrow path was a dead-end, a suicide in cartography, but of course their father always taught them that there were things worth dying for. They recover the body and send it into the sun, a spacefighter’s burial; and in the spring they come back with Arishat and sixty ships, and level Helike to the ground.

 

 

Scipio is in Spain, everyone is in Spain except Arishat, who is garroting people in Lucania, and few reports trickle in to Hannibal. Scipio does not cypher his messages—the quickest way to catch the eye of a Roman hacker—but crafts them to be innocuous, like any travelling merchant’s transmissions home. ROUGH LANDING AT NEW CARTHAGE, one says, BUT THANK NEPTUNE LAGOON VERY PRETTY THIS TIME OF YEAR. Another reads, HARD TO FLY SHIP ON EMPTY STOMACH YOU TAUGHT ME THAT. A third, more hair-raising still: MET YOUR FAMILY SEEM TO HAVE BEEN ADOPTED ALL WISH YOU WERE HERE.

“I think he’s doing all right,” Hannibal tells the ghost.

 

 

He shouldn’t have been surprised to see the hologram on board Hasdrubal’s elephantine. Every piece of Sychaeus’ hardware has been upgraded to within an inch of its life—five decks of sonic guns, an engine that could overtake a Numidian skiff—but of course the mainframe computer is the same one from twenty years ago, and it still has their father’s ghost on it. “Jump out at the next bend, boys! Don’t look back! Don’t forget what you swore!”

Hasdrubal groans. “I knew we were due for another haunting.”

Hannibal doesn’t like seeing the ghost here. It belongs on board Surus, where nothing ever works as it should, anyway. Here, among the silver-inlaid fixtures and the elegant chrome trimmings, it looks exactly like what it is, an unearthly relic of a bad memory. “You could get a new ship. Arishat did.”

“Don’t be condescending,” says Hasdrubal. “Arishat wasn’t at Helike. I was.”

The ghost flickers from one end of the cabin to the other, tinted red by the rosy light of the Seven Moons in the porthole. Another day or two, and they will be laying siege to Rome. “Go! Jump out now! Don’t stop till you reach orbit and don’t—look—back!”

“How did I forget,” says Hannibal. “I was stuck with you for two days.”

Two days and two nights, no food, no sleep, fleeing on foot from the palm grove while the rebels’ shouts and the howling sniffer-hounds closed in on them by the hour. If Surus hadn’t somehow overriden his autopilot protocols and landed—apparently on his own volition—to pick them up, it would have been the end. Only after the funeral did Hannibal wonder if the ship’s ghost had something to do with it; if Hamilcar had saved them not once, but twice that day.

“That,” Hasdrubal agrees, “was almost worse than our father dying for us. Hard reboot, Sychaeus.”

The floating screens blink out. When the mainframe comes back online and the screens reappear, the hologram is gone, and they are alone in the cabin once more.

Hannibal lets out a breath, and plucks his flask out of the air. Celtiberian wine is always a harrowing experience, and having to drink it through a straw does little to improve the vintage, but the fact that Scipio brought him this cask all the way from New Carthage does lend it a certain sweet _pathos_. “Anyway,” he says, coming back to what they were talking about before the ghost derailed their conversation, “you were right.”

He treads carefully. He does not want to be condescending. Arishat and Mago forget their rages as quickly as they fly into them, but the middle Barca children share a different temperament. “You mean,” says Hasdrubal, “about this being a lot harder than you thought it would be?”

“Oh, don’t hold back. Your exact words were, ‘You’ll either disappear in the Alps and never be heard from again—’”

“‘—or grow old gnashing your teeth at the walls of Rome.’”

“You’re still wrong on the first count.”

Hasdrubal grins, unexpected, like his smiles always are. “And you can stop gnashing your teeth now that Scipio and I are here.”

Reflexively, Hannibal glances out the porthole to the rear of the convoy, where Scipio’s elephantine—latest model, Archimedean laser guns, artificial gravity, no ghost—is taking turns with Surus to act as rearguard. Surus looks quite content with his new friend, his trunk and tailpipe swishing in small placid arcs. He’s an old ship now, far too old for active service. When this is over Hannibal will pack him full of books and take him on a long pleasure cruise, just the two of them, pilot and ship, and Scipio too if he wants to come.

“I told him why you didn’t kill him at the Ticinus,” says Hasdrubal abruptly. “He asked me. I knew you’d never say.”

Hannibal surfaces from mapping out, in exquisite detail, the twenty-third day of their flight path past the scenic ringed planets of Spain. “I knew he’d ask you.”

“He saved his old man,” says Hasdrubal. “He did what we couldn’t.”

“He still does,” says Hannibal.

 

 

This is how a war ends:

They meet the last Roman army in orbit, and Surus gets into a head-on dogfight with the flagship of Fabius Maximus, who is now completely white-haired and very venerable. Hannibal waits for an opening to disable the ship without killing its pilot—delicate work, and perhaps he would not have managed it without getting shot down himself, but then the _Neptune_ pulls up to port, scything between the eagle ships like a comet-trail as it lays down covering fire to keep Surus safe. Hannibal fires on the flagship, and the legions disintegrate, and he thinks, he could have won without Scipio, of _course_ he could, but he’s glad he didn’t have to.

Or perhaps it still hasn’t ended. Not yet, not till the next day, when Hannibal has gone forty hours without sleep and the Carthaginian Senate won’t stop calling and he doesn’t know how he will feed his army if the Romans continue to hold out. Scipio bursts onto Surus’ bridge, radiant, smiling; barrels into Hannibal at such a velocity that they both hit the far wall. Hannibal says, “I shouldn’t have given you the passcode,” and Scipio says, “It’s done,” and Hannibal says, “ _You’re_ done,” and tries to ricochet him out the door, and Scipio says, “No, the Romans, they’ve surrendered,” and Hannibal says, “Oh,” and Scipio bursts out laughing and kisses him violently.

Perhaps even then it isn’t over. It isn’t over for many weeks, until Hannibal signs the final treaty after a long and laborious series of peace talks, and takes a shuttle back up to the camp on the Capitoline. Evening is turning to night, a splendid gold-streaked affair here on the Seven Moons. His brothers are occupying the Janiculum and Arishat is off garroting people in Sardinia and his father, his father is waiting for him, right here in Surus’ cabin.

“Deft work,” says the ghost, through the marmoreal calm of the hologram’s face. “Not without errors, but nothing unpardonable, I think.”

“What?”

“I always hated the aorist tense myself,” says Hamilcar. “But this is a fine translation. You’re better at it than I was.”

A fragment of a memory surfaces: the schoolroom at Gades thirty years ago, his father looking at the translation of Hesiod, or maybe it was Herodotus, that Sosylus had made him do. It’s hard not to think—to want to think—that out of all its memory traces, its vast bank of sound files, the ship’s ghost chose to play this one tonight for a reason. Hannibal says, “Father?”

Already the hologram is fading. Its green glow softens, and for a few seconds it looks just like the rainlight over Capua. “Well, you’ve worked long enough,” says Hamilcar. “Get some rest, child.”

That is the last of it, the end of a thirty-year-old conversation. The ghost flickers out, plunging the cabin into darkness; and Hannibal knows, with a certainty he feels mostly in the corner of his eye and the lining of his throat, that he will never hear his father’s voice again.

He’s still standing in the unlit doorway when Scipio joins him. “Who were you talking to?”

“Surus,” says Hannibal.

But Scipio knows, even if he is too shrewd and too sensitive to say so. Their minds have reached an understanding, just as their bodies know each other in the dark with a tender and unthinking delicacy. They go to the porthole together and look out at the evening, at the red planet of Rome filling the sky like a blooming camellia, bathing the camp in rosy warmth. “It’s breathtaking,” says Scipio. “In a deadly way.”

The light sets his face aglow, picking out the fine angles of his profile, the many medals on his flight suit. Beautiful, dangerous things. It’s been a long war, but they’re still young and they have time, so much time, so much more they could do together.

“Indeed,” says Hannibal. He smiles. It _is_ over, then. “Come here.”

**Author's Note:**

>  _"Hamilcar saved his sons and his friends by sending them off on one road while he took a different one to draw off the pursuit. As the enemy, led by their king, were about to overtake him he plunged on horseback into a broad flooding river to perish. But Hannibal and his brother escaped [...]."_ \- Dexter Hoyos, _Hannibal's Dynasty_
> 
> Disclaimer: I don't know Ancient Greek, and I'm sure the aorist is a perfectly nice tense.
> 
> We know nothing about Hannibal's sisters except who they married, so Arishat is more or less an OC. (Her husband "Handsome": Hannibal's brother-in-law Hasdrubal the Fair, also variously known as the Magnificent, the Splendid, and... the Handsome.)
> 
> [enemyofrome on tumblr](http://enemyofrome.tumblr.com/post/171311299273/interstellar-punic-wars-part-2)—follow for more classics nonsense or check out my [original novel](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/32322796-elegy) if you're into enemies-as-lovers


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